The toxic ‘embrace’ of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
By Kurt Hofmann
Last October, St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner published a three-part series critiquing a book, “Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea,” by Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), and Casey Anderson. The series started with “The REAL reason CSGV hates the right to keep and bear arms–it works,” followed by “CSGV says only the government can protect you from . . . the government,” and ended with “Divide and conquer: CSGV’s strategy to disarm us piecemeal.” Something has now come up that perhaps makes revisiting that last piece worthwhile.
CSGV’s favorite bogeyman is a (CSGV-invented) group it calls the “Insurrectionists” (always capitalized)–those terrifying, evil extremists, who believe that the Second Amendment was written to protect the people’s right to the means to resist, and hopefully cast down, a government whose lust for power outstrips its willingness to abide by the confines of the Constitution. You know–terrorists like Tench Coxe, who spouted such villanies as:
Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American … the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
Let’s not even mention the kind of treasonous dog who would talk about refreshring the tree of liberty.
The Horwitz/Anderson book offers like-minded readers some strategies, including that of separating the “Insurrectionists” from other gun owners. As the book says:
Isolate the Insurrectionists by embracing the self-defenders and the sporting gun owners. The fact remains that most gun owners are not Insurrectionists. The majority of gun owners keep guns primarily for self-protection or recreation, not to prepare for some future Armageddon. Insurrectionists do not deserve the cover provided them by self-defenders and sporting gun owners.
As pointed out in the “Divide and conquer” column, CSGV seems not to have made the task of “embracing the self-defenders” easy for itself. The group, after all, once called itself the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, and according to author Kristin A. Gross, changed the name in 1989 not because they lost interest in banning handguns, but because they by then also wanted to ban so-called “assault weapons.” From “Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America“:
In that year [1989], the National Coalition to Ban Handguns changed its name to Coalition to Stop Gun Violence to reflect its view that assault rifles, as well as handguns, should be outlawed.
It should be noted that the group still has the same president, Mike Beard, now, that it did under the old name. Beard, indeed, has been the group’s only president, since its inception in 1974, so it’s hard to imagine that the organization’s attitudes about handguns–found in the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald decisions to be Americans’ “quintessential” choice for self-defense*–have changed.
Please donate and support Oath Keepers mission, every little bit helps!
